Donald Trump Proves
He Is a Fascist Once Again
March 14, 2024
It is clear that Donald Trump thinks that any criticism of
him or his actions (which are so erratic that we can hardly call them policies)
is illegal and should be criminally prosecuted. He has said in so many words
that his critics should be in jail. He obviously knows next to nothing about
the First Amendment to the US Constitution and cares even less than he knows.
In a constitutional democracy with constitutional guarantees of certain
freedoms for the populace, which our country used to be and which some of us
believe it can be again, expressing opposition to the president or the
president's administration is not a crime. It is constitutionally protected
free speech. The regimes, and sometimes many if not most of the people, of
authoritarian or totalitarian nations do not believe in free speech. Let me
tell you a story of how I once encountered that distinction between people who
believe in the citizen's right and duty to criticism their government and
people who do not.
In the summer of 1968, I participated in a Russian language study program of
Indiana University. We spent five weeks studying, and speaking only, Russian on
the IU campus. Then, we went to the USSR for five weeks. The group of
participants I was in went first to what was then Leningrad, now once again St
Petersburg. One evening one person in our group brought a Soviet citizen with
him back to a hotel room where we had gathered. I don't know who that Russian
man was. Maybe he was a KGB plant, maybe he wasn't. Whatever. He said to us:
"You Americans say only bad things about my country and our government.
How would you like it if people were always saying bad things about your
country and its government?" Now, understand. This was the height of the
Vietnam War era. Bobby Kennedy, the nation's best hope for ending that illegal
and immoral war, had recently been assassinated. We said bad things about our
government and our president Lyndon Johnson every single day. Many of the
members of our group had "Clean for Gene" stickers on their luggage,
expressing their support for the anti-Vietnam War candidate for the Democrats'
presidential nomination Gene McCarthy. It never occurred to any of us that we
were doing anything wrong when we criticized or even damned our government and
the people in it who had gotten us into and kept us in that unconscionable war.
We were all Americans. We had all grown up in a constitutional republic with
constitutional guarantees of our right to free speech. If anything, we thought
it was our duty as American citizens to speak out against something that our
country was doing that was horrifically wrong. The same was true when we
supported the Civil Rights Movement and condemned American racism. The Russian
man we had encountered had grown up in a totalitarian state with no meaningful
guarantees of citizens' rights whatsoever.[1]
We felt perfectly free to criticize our government. He thought any criticism of
his government was just wrong. In fact, it was, in effect at least, illegal for
a Soviet citizen to criticize their government.
Donald Trump wants to turn the United States into the Soviet Union at least in
this regard. He calls opponents enemies and terrible people. He says they
should be in jail. He would be perfectly happy to write the First Amendment out
of the US Constitution if he could.
Folks, what more proof do we need that Trump is an American fascist? Fascists,
and Communists, who for our purposes here are indistinguishable from them,
eliminate free speech and the free press. They throw people into jail who
criticize them. That's not the American way! That's' the fascist way. The
Soviet Communists did it. The German Nazis did it. The Chinese Communists do
it. Vladimir Putin does it. There is no avoiding the truth that Donald Trump is
an American fascist. We must all do everything we legally and nonviolently can
to rein him in, stop him from doing more damage to our country, and work to
repair the damage we haven't been able to stop. My criticizing Trump here does
not make me a criminal. It makes me an American. If only Donald Trump knew and
respected that truth.
[1]
The Soviet constitution actually did have a clause in it guaranteeing the
citizens’ right to free speech. That clause was meaningless, and everyone in
the USSR knew it. No citizen could raise it as a defense when charged with the
crime of criticizing the government.
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